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is a country allowed to capitally punish a person if not governed by a king or monarch?
Capital punishment doesn’t seem to be an issue of dina d’malchus. Paying taxes, property ownership, legal contracts etc…are what most gemaras and rishonim discuss when dealing with this topic. Perhaps the rambam would include it as he seems to view dina d’malchus as an offshoot of dinei melech which could incorporate anything the king wants to do.
Killing people in response to committing crimes is a very interesting halachic issue but is probably more of a question with regards to dinei nefesh than dina d’malchusa dina.
klach,
Why would it matter?
I’ve been told by two Jews should not serve on juries in capital cases in the US not because of the form of government but because the standards for handing down a death sentence don’t meet the halachic standards of even non-Jewish courts.
Reb Moshe zt’l said that we shouldn’t support capital punishment because this is going to cause killing unzerer.
Charlie: We’ve spoken about that before. The nations are obliged to set up laws and enforce them. Do you know where the standards for those laws are discussed?
“Reb Moshe zt’l said that we shouldn’t support capital punishment because this is going to cause killing unzerer.”
There is a tshuva in Igros Moshe to the “governor” (dosent say wich governor or what state) in response to that governors inquiery to the Torahs point of view in regard to capital punishment. His answer is that the Torah has very strict requierments and was carried out very rarely.
Rav Moshe Feinstein in a letter to the governor of New York wrote explaining that the strict requirements of Torah law limiting executions only applied historically in the limited case of a well ordered society. But there is a legitimate use of capital punishment to defend society – even where the Torah law is not fulfilled. A secular society has the right to protect itself.
Effectively, Reb Moshe is telling the governor that it is appropriate to use capital punishment in the United States even in cases that don’t meet the strict legal halachic requirements:
As a consequence of these two factors there were almost no Jewish murderers because of the awareness of the severity of the prohibition of murder and because they were educated by means of the Torah and the punishments of the Torah to understand the seriousness of the crime. They were not simply afraid of punishment in the sense of getting caught but were afraid of the crime itself.
“The nations are obliged to set up laws and enforce them. Do you know where the standards for those laws are discussed? “
Yes, in Sanhedrin 55-59. And the gemara requires an eyewitness to the crime for a death sentence in a Noachide court. The US executes people based on zero eyewitnesses.
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